Cait read and liked Ceridwen's review of Ulysses:

"I “finished” “reading” this about two weeks ago and have been grappling with the following question for the last fortnight: am I the kind of asshole who gives Ulysses two stars? It turns out that yes, yes I am. From the very beginning, I stru...more I “finished” “reading” this about two weeks ago and have been grappling with the following question for the last fortnight: am I the kind of asshole who gives Ulysses two stars? It turns out that yes, yes I am. From the very beginning, I struggled with the idea of meaning in Ulysses - due in part because of stupid blurbs like Anthony Burgess's on the back on my copy: “Everybody knows now that Ulysses is the greatest novel of the century.” Of course, this blurb is about as douche-baggy as it comes. “We” all “know” that this is the “greatest” novel, do we, “Anthony”? (Yes, I am aware that sarcasm is the refuge of the weak.) It may be stupid, but this quote does gesture to the common knowledge of this novel's cult/occult status as one of the gnarliest books ever, the holy grail of really hard reads, the kind of thing to notch on your bedpost after its conquest. You won't take me, Ulysses, I''ll take you.

There's an implicit challenge in all of this critical jizz blown over Ulysses, one that I was willing to take on when my sister proposed we read this. We'll all go in together! It'll be fun! Nothing can stop us now! So I start reading, and I immediately start having a problem with the idea of meaning, but – this is the almost funny part – I had no idea how deep my trouble with meaning went. I hack my way through roughly 200 pages, and then decide its time to bust out my reader's guide, knowing full well that I'm so awesome that I don't really need it, and it'll just tell me that I'm awesome and then I can go back to reading. Alas, what it told me was that not only did I not get the billions of Classical references, something I was more or less prepared for, but that I didn't even get the simple, concrete meaning of the action. For example, I thought, when Stevie D was out walking on the quay, that there actually was a whale that some people were cutting up. Nope, this is some imagining into the past, a glimpse of ancient Ireland. Arg!

Not long after this confrontation with the edges of my entirely not-Classical education, one of my fellow readers send me this link. (Thanks Gary!) If you're not interested in popping out and watching this right now, I'll describe it: it's a Marx Brothers skit, in which Groucho is at the races, trying to determine which horse on which he should bet. Harpo comes up, purportedly selling ice cream, but then he offers to sell Groucho a track guide. He does, but then it turns out he needs another book to read the first book, and then another to read that, on and on until he's given Harpo most of his money, and then bets on the wrong horse anyway. Ha, funny right? I would have to read an entire mountain of books to get what is up in Ulysses, and then, like the joke I just explained, I wonder if I would just be murdering to dissect, killing the punch line cold.

This is the thing: I'm not sure that this is what Joyce would want, not that I've ever given much credit to a writer's intent. Despite all the hand wringing I've been doing about Meaning, worrying about not “getting” the joke and all that, Ulysses itself is entirely, aggressively anti-Meaning, in the Classical, epic, heroic sense of the term. Nothing – and I mean nothing – is too base and low to not warrant his attention, not Bloom taking a leisurely morning crap while reading the paper, not having a shave, not bickering in a coach on the way to a funeral. It's the great anti-Epic. It may claim to be a novel, but the language has the luminous fracture of Modernist poetry, skimming along just outside of form in an almost self-conscious parody of itself. I suspect if I had a six thousand hour audiobook of this novel, I would have enjoyed it more, letting the words wash in their ebb and flow, and quit trying to catch fish out of the river. (Also, if Joyce had read it himself – he had a lovely voice.) The Epic creates heroes out of sociopaths – I'm looking at you Achilles. (Or the Devil in “Paradise Lost”, although I think probably poor Milton is rolling in his grave about what the Romantics did with his depiction of Old Scratch.) Ulysses doesn't just turn this upside down and create sociopaths out of heroes, but something weirder and more sly: he makes the banal unheroic. Which is what it was to begin with. Which kinds of makes my head hurt.

This is just a bit a personal weirdness, but while I was reading, I kept thinking of this oddball story I was told once. Tom is a colleague of mine, and once, he was in the process of moving all of his stuff from one apartment to another. Everything he owned was all heaped in the back of his truck, held in by gravity and magic. He's on the freeway, and feels it shift, and watches in horror as his stuff slides off the back of the truck one piece at a time, spilling out onto the open road. As each item hits the pavement, it breaks into pieces, and those pieces roll and become smaller pieces, until almost everything he owns is strewn over a quarter mile of highway. He exits and doubles back around, and stands fishing out the few things that haven't been utterly destroyed by their recent bout with gravity and its consequences. He does this quickly, as he's pretty sure he's going to get some massive fine for being a litterbug if a State Trooper happens by. Reading Ulysses was for me like watching the English language fall off the back of the truck and break into a billion pieces. I could fish out the odd lamp, but the rest was debris. It's funny when this happens to someone else – poor Tom – but it sure wasn't funny when it happened to me.
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Cait read and liked Shannon's review of Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex:

"Mary Roach is ridiculously readable. The following are the quotes in the book that made me lol. (Keep in mind, I am weird. The first one isn't even supposed to be funny, but out of context- it makes me laugh, for some reason).

"Archib...more Mary Roach is ridiculously readable. The following are the quotes in the book that made me lol. (Keep in mind, I am weird. The first one isn't even supposed to be funny, but out of context- it makes me laugh, for some reason).

"Archibald concedes that the machines represent a stereotypically male notion of what women enjoy."

"The job of a production pig is to produce more pigs, as many pigs as pigly possible."

"Perhaps I would decipher the secret language of pigs."

"Who clubs a hamster?"

"'I am increasingly wretched.'"

"I want to trip him, not out of meanness, but just to see the penises fly through the air and rain down around us."

Okay, so they are all taken out of context, but I like it better that way.

And note: the pig quotes are courtesy of a chapter on pig-stimulation. Totally creepy/gross. Yet informative.

So, yay to Roach for discussing topics I'd never heard of at all. Not like I'm a massive sexual deviant, but I've taken plenty of sexual diversity classes in college and all that nonsense, and they all seem to cover more or less the same ground. Roach, being the investigator-journalist that she is, discusses issues that I'd previously never even heard of (again: pig stimulation- with the purpose of creating as many pigs as pigly possible. Heh. "Pigly".)

Also- She discusses the Master's and Johnson's studies, of course, which is a pretty widely examined study, but mentions a fact that I'd never heard of before (but have always known, deep in my heart, intuitively): "The best sex going on in Master's and Johnson's lab was the sex being had by the committed gay and lesbian couples. Not because they were practicing special secret homosexual sex techniques*, but because they 'took their time.'" HA. Even Master's and Johnson, who did not approve of homosexuality (their Homosexuality in Perspective paper was largely about how to convert gays to the far less glorious [not an insult, I'm just saying: scientifically speaking] heterosexual lifestyle) had to concede that the gaysex was the best sex.

Oh man Mary Roach, as if I wasn't enough of a gay-elitist now I'm going to go around telling everyone that gay sex is scientifically better. SAYS SCIENCE.


So: YOU SHOULD READ THIS. The end.


*But they were, totally.

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Cait read and liked Lightreads's review of Horizon (The Sharing Knife, #4):

"In which this four-book romance fantasy wanders – by which I mean plot? What plot? – to a close – by which I mean babies for all!

Yikes. A friend called this the "never-ending beige adventure," which made me laugh. More tha...more In which this four-book romance fantasy wanders – by which I mean plot? What plot? – to a close – by which I mean babies for all!

Yikes. A friend called this the "never-ending beige adventure," which made me laugh. More than the book did.

I'm feeling kind of cranky about this book. It's intellectually boring, with a thematic conversation (communication, clashing and changing paradigms, etc.) little deeper than your average morality play. I could forgive intellectual boredom for emotional interest – God knows I've done that before. But my emotional needle didn't so much as quiver throughout. I will say that the book is at least prettily, if . . . rustically written. And I don't usually get cranky over boring, because boring for me is a great romance for someone else (though, I've never met anyone who was actually really moved by this particular series . . . Bueller?).

No, the real problem is the explicit and implicit helping of babymaking propaganda. Did you guys know that the purpose of marriage is babies? Didya didya didya? The sheer amount of moral imperative this series piles on reproduction – though, okay, not always heteronormatively – is staggering because half of it is delivered with this 'duh' of universal unarguable truth, which, um, no, and the other half feels entirely unconscious and kind of uncomfortable as a glimpse of author id to me. The older I get, the more toxic that becomes. Yeurgh.
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